The Scientific Threat to the Consumer’s Atomistic Ethos
Is the world made of relations rather than things?
Perhaps science has ironically undermined not just Christendom but Western individualism and thus the mythos that underpins our consumer lifestyles.
That’s Pierz Newton-John’s suspicion that coheres with Yuval Harari’s book Homo Deus and with “postmodern” (largely French intellectual) jadedness. But Newton-John is no cynic, and he hopes the “relationalist” implications of quantum mechanics in metaphysics and culture will support a more ecologically viable lifestyle than the ravenous one we currently perpetrate.
The problem, he says, is that late-modern science blows up not just theism but atomism. There are no intrinsic properties, according to Newton-John’s philosophical extrapolation from quantum mechanics. There are only systems or networks of relations, not perfectly independent, monadic things anywhere being related.
Thus, Newton-John builds more specifically on James Ladyman’s and Don Ross’s book All Things Must Go, which argues that “metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects.” Another forerunner here was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which argued that…
